Ex-General Says Wargames Were Rigged

Posted by andreas from p3EE3C346.dip.t-dialin.net (62.227.195.70) on Friday, October 04, 2002 at 7:08AM :

In Reply to: Ready for WOAAARRH ? posted by andreas from p3EE3C346.dip.t-dialin.net (62.227.195.70) on Friday, October 04, 2002 at 6:40AM :

As a follow up to an earlier posting entitled: 'Saif Sareea' = "Swift [-ly Disintegrating] Sword" concentrating on a recently botched British military exercise, now justice and a more balanced coverage requires also a quick glance at the US.

Generally these articles on military stuff could seem a bit inappropriate on a dedicated Assyrian forum and these reported military blunderings wouldn't be worth any mention anyway if being only purely singular events - but they are - alas - symptomatical of the mindset and mind state of the military-industrial complex and its puppet politicians held on tight strings: rotten to the core.

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World Tribune.com
August 16, 2002

Ex-General Says Wargames Were Rigged

By Robert Burns
AP Military Writer
Friday, August 16, 2002; 5:44 PM

WASHINGTON –– A retired general who commanded "enemy" forces in a recently
concluded $250 million U.S. war game says the exercise was rigged so that
it appeared to validate new war-fighting concepts it was supposed to test.

Paul Van Riper, who headed the Marine Corps Combat Development Command when
he retired in 1997 as a three-star general, said he became so frustrated
with undue constraints on his command of "enemy" forces that he quit the
role midway through Millennium Challenge 2002, which ended Aug. 15.

His complaints were reported Friday by the Army Times, a private newspaper
that covers Army issues. The Times obtained a copy of an e-mail Van Riper
sent to colleagues explaining why he had quit.

"It was in actuality an exercise that was almost entirely scripted to
ensure a Blue (friendly forces) 'win,'" he wrote. Van Riper was in command
of the Red force, meant to simulate the enemy.

Navy Capt. John Carman, chief spokesman at Joint Forces Command at Norfolk,
Va., which sponsored the war game, said Friday that there is no record of
Van Riper having quit his role as "enemy" commander. He said the retired
general is "held in high regard" and entitled to his opinions.

"We don't agree with his conclusions," Carman said.

Van Riper, who participated as a TRW contract employee, said he was
concerned that the military would implement new war-fighting concepts on
the basis of what he considers to be false conclusions from the three-week
exercise.

Carman said the results of the war game were being evaluated and that some
concepts will require further experimentation.

Millennium Challenge 2002 was two years in the making and involved a wide
range of U.S. military commands across the country linked by computer
networks to simulated troops, air and sea units with 13,500 actual military
personnel fighting a classified war scenario.

Van Riper said exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own
tactics and ideas against the Blue, or friendly, forces, and on several
occasions the Red forces were directed not to use certain weapons against
Blue.

Robert Oakley, a retired ambassador who played the role of civilian leader
of the Red force, told the Times that Van Riper was outthinking the Blue
force. He said, for example, that in the computer simulations, Van Riper
used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating the Blue forces'
high-tech eavesdropping capabilities. When the Blue naval forces sailed
into the Persian Gulf early in the experiment, Van Riper's forces
surrounded the ships with small boats and planes.

Much of the Blue force's ships ended up at the bottom of the ocean. Oakley
said Joint Forces Command officials had to stop the exercise and "refloat"
the fleet in order to continue.

"I want to disabuse anybody of any notion that somehow the books were
cooked," Mayer told the Times. He said, however, that "certain things are
scripted" in any large war game. "You have to execute in a certain way or
you'll never be able to bring it all together," he said.

Mayer said that in some parts of the exercise Van Riper was constrained "in
order to facilitate the conduct of the experiment."

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On the Net: Millennium Challenge 2002 at
http://www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/mc02/faq.htm